I recently got two collections of comics.
The first is DC Comics' Batman--Vampire. It's labeled "Tales of the Multiverse," which I guess is DC's version of Marvel's What If. It's three tales from the 90's of Batman as a vampire. That sentence will either make you want to buy it immediately or run screaming from the room. Needless to say, I was in the former group. It did not disappoint at all, except for this. It features an introduction by Eric Van Lustbader, best known as "That guy who wrote the horrible ninja book we used to read the dirty parts from at Danny's house when we were 13." At least that's how he's known to me. Anyway, he writes the following bit of idiocy: "The dark, grimy urban swamp has become a nightmare world so like many of our post-modern urban landscapes, inhabited by shambling untermenschen, seemingly irredeemably decayed."
I mean, I'm not expecting anything spectacular in the way of analysis from Eric Van Freaking Lustbader, but this is just a spectacularly dumb take on urban life. Yeah, real cities are just like this comic book--the rain is inexplicably red, and a plague of vampires stalks the streets. Ah, well, I guess I'm just a shambling untermensch, so what do I know.
The other book I got is An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, edited by Ivan Brunetti. This is a gorgeous book--the kind of book that's a joy to look at, the kind of book that ensures that real books will survive the advent of the Kindle. There's a bunch of different stuff, but it's pointedly non-superhero related, and since it's published by Yale University Press, it's mostly fairly "serious". Some of this is good, and some of it is bad (I really didn't need the graphic depiction of a child being sodomized--it actually made me put the book down and not pick it back up. And by the way, if you got here googling the phrase "child being sodomized" please go kill yourself.)
And, I mean, so this is an attempt at serious art as opposed to lowbrow genre art like Batman--Vampire. One of the things people complain about in genre fiction, or comic books, or whatever, is its formulaic nature. But serious comic art has its own conventions and cliches. Like, for example, the pointless autobiographical reminiscence. Alison Bechdel wrote an amazing graphic memoir in Fun Home, but most of this stuff is like, "The time I wet myself in fifth grade," or "The time I didn't get asked to the prom." The other convention is "Sour, usually bespectacled man makes sour observations about life and has bad things happen to him." These two genres cover probably half the stuff in this book.
Now, I've read enough comic books in my day to know that a lot of them are crap. But so, it appears, is a lot of "Graphic Fiction." It seems the absence of muscular guys in tights is no guarantee of quality.
